My life has been magickally affected since beginning work with Rob.
Magical, spiritual, super- or ultranormal— Whatever you call It, it has reached into my life and twisted all the threads of my fate into a tangled mess. I prefer magick with-a-k for the obvious distinguisher from “Illusions, Michael. Tricks are something whores do for money.”
I find reading Taroh a rewarding cognitive exercise.
It's probably obvious by now that I spend a lot of time alone. And that this has been the case for the majority of my life.
I make the joke often that I'm a prime candidate to be a serial killer or mass shooter. It never gets a laugh. Usually people give you the appropriately leery looks when you admit something like that. But it's true. I grew up in the right environment. Childhood trauma, both violent and sexual, years of feelings of inadequacy and feeling imprisoned.... The violent fantasies.
Sure. I used to fantasize frequently about how I'd deal with people who had wronged me. And not at all unlike Tool's “Culling Voices,” I had more than a few make-believe conversations – to the point that more than a few times I couldn't remember what I'd imagined and what really happened. But I have never, taken advantage of any situation where I have had an imbalance of power. Certainly I've made misguided decisions that have caused people slight injury – like, one time I thought my brother had the top run of a ladder around the lowest limbs of a tree (for whatever stupid reason), so I thought I'd scare him by pulling the ladder away from the tree.
Legitimately did not think it would come crashing, with him, to the ground.
He was fine. It was like a six-foot fall.
The reason why is probably more interesting than the fact.
I've said before that I was very careful with my psychology when I was a kid. I have worked pretty hard not to witness death. In fiction, yes, but in my life, especially. Like, I wouldn't even watch PG-13 movies without adult supervision until I was thirteen. I called my parents in North Carolina from Ohio because my younger brother was trying to watch Stormship Troopers with my grandparents. I hid upstairs and plugged my ears.
Lol. I was a particular kid.
Or maybe I just desperately wanted my parents' approval. Approval which will never come.
I didn't want to desensitize myself to violence. To seeing things dead. To seeing things hurting.
And probably that was wise of me. A few years ago, a guy attacked me at an intersection, and I pulled my punch. I pulled my punch because I knew that he couldn't actually defend himself, and I didn't want to actually hurt him – as badly as I wanted to be justified in hurting him really fucking bad.
Poverty and unhealthy home/work environments doe hellish things to our minds.
If I had allowed my life, my father, to desensitize me to violence, I could have killed him and wouldn't have any problem with it. He nearly killed me at a crosswalk. Then he got out of his car. In Ohio – a Stand Your Ground state. I wasn't about to get shot in the back by this self-important prick in his Escalade, with his suit and tie and his perfectly trimmed beard. I'm trying to walk to work.
And who are the cops going to believe? The guy in the suit with the Escalade, or the poor person with the backpack and the bad attitude?
So, anyway, I've been thinking about fantasization.
I read a lot of pop psychology. Listen to a lot of Self-Help gurus I try, in other words, to maintain a healthy and varied intellectual diet. I see a lot of people with nothing new to say teaching the same old “secrets” and upholding the same old advice that Cicero gave, no less. But one thing that so many educators do when they're preparing to teach you something is to fantasize.
Maybe it was my introduction to Buddhism in high school. I say that a lot. Maybe it was the day I wrestled my muse to the ground and strangled it dead so it would stop making me fantasize about things I didn't want to think about. You have fantasies like that when you're a teenaged boy. Whatever it was, I don't much have the ability to fantasize anymore.
Like, I can't conceptualize the future.
Now, that's probably as much a relic of my repeated childhood head trauma or living just to make it to the next day for eighteen years... but you know, it's a fact. It is admittedly difficult to get from Point A in one's life to Point B when one cannot conceptualize what Point B is. It's no excuse, but I legitimately didn't expect to live this long. I'm learning life skills you're supposed to learn in high school, in University, which I never thought I would survive to need.
But The Hard Way seems to be the only way I know to do thing.
I've discussed some of the Cycles of my life before in this space. Another is that I routinely do things the most difficult way possible – if I'm interested in them enough to do them at all.
I can't just write a Fantasy novel. No. I have to get it in my head to edit the memoir of a person who speaks telepathically into my mind and who may or may not be a figment of the Imagination I no longer think I have.
And let me tell you something – all this started before I started doing anything remotely like dabbling in mind-altering substances OR magick.
Now, magick is something I've always been interested in. But, like drugs, is something I knew better to just stay the Hell away from as a kid.
Maybe it was the Angels. Maybe it was some other weird things that happened to me when I was a kid – that aren't weird enough to tell in stories. Deja vu situations, prophetic dreams, yadda yadda. But I left magick and all of its trappings alone. That isn't to say I didn't try to learn about It, as much as I could in what amounted to a Fundamentalist Christian-Atheist household.
What does it mean to be Chosen?
I think about this a lot. A lot.
It's what we all want, right? That's the Hero's Journey that we all want to play out in our lives. Right? To be the missing piece in whatever puzzle? To go someplace where everybody knows your name?
What did it really mean to be chosen by a god, for instance? What was prophecy? And what does it mean to be a prophet?
I can't find it again, and I have found no one to corroborate it, but in a Great Lectures Course I idly listened to some years ago (like you do) the speaker defined Prophecy as coming from a words which effectively means “to vomit forth.” As in, the prophecy is vomited out of you by some compulsion, like a bodily, or autonomic, action.
The first time I heard that, it was like like fireworks went off in my head.
I've been doing that shit since I was a kid! Spouting off ignorant observations or predictions which would prove to be more than just accurate – spot on. And never on purpose. It's not like it was a skill. If anything, it was like Carl Jung describes in his memoir when he talks about his uncanny knack to casually toss out into conversation with new acquaintances whatever thing they were trying to hide from the conversation.
It's embarrassing and confusing and people do not like it.
So, anyway, I don't know how to segue here and I'm running out of room to keep going for today. What if I told you that I think I have a goddess that has “chosen” me for something?
That's as much as I really know or understand. So much of this – this blog, this thing with Rob, this whatever the Hell is going on with my 30s – I just don't understand. Am not equipped with the life skills necessary to understand. And even less do I understand the knowing that I have a goddess looking over my shoulder.
I said I read Taroh.
Taroh is interesting because it's all probabilities, right? There are however many cards there are and they all have one meaning. So there are really only so many probable narratives that can be told with the cards, right? That's how I like to read them – I do very simple readings. I do the three card Past, Present, Future reading, and then I try to interpret the three cards as sort of a sentence. One narrative. One message in the three cards and their individual meanings. Sort of a wheels within wheels approach.
How difficult can I make the metaphor to comprehend for myself before there is only the static?
Anyway, She has made herself known many times in the cards. And one of the things that she tells me that I am meant to do is be a teacher. Which is interesting, and why I wanted to start writing in the first place.
What does it mean to be a teacher?
Where did Jesus get the authority – not just the communal authority, but the personal authority – to go on his mission? A teaching of humility and compassion is one thing, but where did it come upon him to be the one to stand and say, “Enough is enough!”
Or is that what prophecy is? Is that what it is to vomit forth?
Is that how there can be false prophets? Is that how there can be people who feel compelled to combat vaccination? How there can be Conservative politicians?
I don't actually think the two things are related as directly as that – but they are related somehow. Intellectual Contagions, right? Where do they come from? Is there a Patient Zero for an Idea?
I dont know.
But I do know that in my search for meaning I think I have been called to teach, in some way. I don't know what that way is. There are many more qualified people than I. But I think that Rob has given me a voice to teach something.
I'm going to end on an anecdote from my university experience.
I was taking a Calculus class at Shawnee State University my senior year of high school. (high school wasn't enough of a challenge, so I made sure to get good enough grades my junior year to be eligible for Post Secondary College Option, as it was called. If I had known about the program I would have skipped high school all together).
The way the instructor managed the class, she split us into groups of four. And rather than homework, we would as a team solve a group of problems, then we would take turns demonstrating one of the problems to the rest of the class. Basically, she would lecture, then we would take turns helping and watching one another implement them.
First off. I learned more in that class than I ever have anywhere in my life. I found very quickly that whatever of the lesson I understood, there was at least one in my group who didn't get it, and every part I got, there was someone who didn't, and for everything in between, we helped one another all understand the concepts by the end of the class.
It was brilliant.
So I think that's the kind of environment I've been tasked with engendering in whatever amount of the internet we can carve out for ourselves.
I have questions. Rob has answers. Maybe together we can figure out what to do about them.
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